digital public spheres – Page 2

25 June 202525 June 2025

Notes from Henry Jenkins book: Convergence Culture

I started reading Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (2006) up to where the free sample ends, around page 78. Right before I chose to buy the ebook, I found a more recent book, Participatory Culture: Interviews (2019) as well as his blog, https://henryjenkins.org/. Ooh, and then also the book Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Social Change (2020). So, distracted. But great notes here and the thoughts they triggered.

30 March 202521 January 2026

Talk: The potential for emergent games to foster curiosity

This is a talk I gave for the Distributed Immersive Participation group, Stockholm University on 28 March 2025. I was happy to have a reason to update my talk, as the ones I gave on this topic in 2019 and 2022 were terribly out of date by now.

Slides: https://indiebio.co.za/curiosity_metaverse_adapted_24mar2025.html
pdf (27MB)
recording: on youtube

15 November 202419 May 2025

AquaSavvy (regenerated)

A group of us recently applied for EU funding for a DUT project, to, basically, bring water into the metaverse. Here’s the TL;DR of what the project is trying to do, should we be successful. Update: we made it through to the final round. We will know if we were successful in July 2025. I’ve updated the abstract to reflect the improvements we did in round 2.

30 October 202430 October 2024

Project 3.0

Some days the writing comes down on you like you need to take an urgent loo break. Today is one of those days.

I’m about to email my potential posts-doc supervisor explaining why I went silent for a long time. Two pivots, that’s why.

17 April 20247 January 2026

Playfulness and truth.

Four recent blogs inspired me:

Starting with how to represent truth, moving to play, and then to belonging. The TL;DR:

The advances of structuring data in mapping unlocks potential for using physical world assets in games. Using physical world assets in emergent approaches to game design is well suited to allowing players to interact with their game worlds in varied ways. Exploring playing with the physical world – morphing and changing it – through games can allow us to learn about the world not through a top-down education, but through a curiosity that does not even have to involve the truth. Through these games we can build a new sense of belonging, that builds a common language across polarised opinions, because it’s just for fun, after all.

14 November 202314 November 2023

Notes from Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger – part 3

Here’s the notes from the first part of her book. There isn’t a second part yet, I skipped to the end of the book because I need to ask about growing communities and needed to prepare it and the last part of the book has good bits for that.

20 October 202320 October 2023

Chantal Mouffe and my game

Someone suggested my thoughts align with Chantal Mouffe and so I went down a rabbithole. Part of that, and critical thinking, is also seeing what critique exists and this quickly developed into a quagmire of who exactly has the right ideas. So I’m being a bit fast and loose here, and using the general ideas as a description of what the game is hoping to help with.

11 October 202311 October 2023

Notes from Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger

I mangle the quotes to tell me story. The gist is a true reflection but it’s not the exact words.

p4 – Both “our” world and the “mirror world” – the world of the conspiracy theorists, agree that post-shock states of discombobulation have been opportunistically exploited in many different contexts. Both groups have a (p24) skepticism of elite power. p53 – The words the mirror world use are essentially fantasy. But emotionally, to many people they clearly feel true. And the reason they feel true is that we are indeed living through a revolution in surveillance tech, and state and corporate actors have indeed seized outrageous powers to monitor us, often in collaboration and coordination with one another. Moreover, as a culture, we have barely begun to reckon with the transformational nature of this shift.

3 October 202310 October 2023

Academic components of peduncle

This project aims to create an interactive real-world based game or platform, visualising complex data onto a stylised, simplified digital twin earth, in order to facilitate insight into how to take action in an uncertain world, at the end of expertise, through an ethic of care and curiosity. It is aimed at grassroots, everyday people and their engagement with data and knowledge, in a visual, 3D, gamified way.

Perpetually in draft and evolving, of course.

25 September 202325 September 2023

Letter of motivation for my incorporation as a collaborating member of CICS.NOVA.Uac.

nothing’s confirmed yet but it’s a decent overview of the what and why.